Applied Pragmatics - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2025

Teachers are often cited as using the nursery we, in which the pronoun we functions as a second-person pronoun (e.g., “We read about this last week”; De Cock, 2011). However, there is little consensus about how listeners perceive its use. An empirical investigation of the nursery we can help determine whether the instructor use of this pronoun strengthens or weakens rapport, an integral aspect of classroom learning. The present study examines frequency and listener perceptions of the nursery we through a mixed-methods approach. A corpus analysis of office hour visits documented in the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language (T2K-SWAL) corpus (Biber et al., 2004) reveals the nursery we is frequent in instructors’ speech but rarely used by students. Survey results demonstrate that students perceive the instructor use of the nursery we to be more likable, helpful, encouraging, and coaxing than the the use of you, and there is a negligible effect between how students perceive the nursery we compared to you in terms of being sarcastic or condescending. Focus group comments suggest the nursery we establishes solidarity between instructors and students, which can strengthen rapport. These findings support the instructor use of the nursery we as a rapport-building technique when interacting with students.

The study investigates the stance marker believe in the progressive aspect, challenging the view established in the ESL community that state verbs are used exclusively in the simple aspect and an overall neglect of the pragmatic meaning associated with different structural forms. The study shows that a corpus-based analysis of naturally occurring data proves the opposite: While the simple aspect remains the prevalent use, believe in progressive displays important pragmatic functions, indicative of immediacy, expression of agency, and intensity. The paper discusses the identified pragmatic functions and relates them to the communicative goals of the registers they are attested in, such as blogs and news reports. News broadcasts, for example, feature interview sources offering their subjective take; in opinion blogs, writers share experience offering evaluation. Speaker agency is thus a crucial component of influencing public opinion or the construction of the online persona. The study has implications for teaching, suggesting that students need exposure to and a thorough understanding of this authentic use.

Strategic competence, conceptualized as the ability to put semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic knowledge into use, is a key element in models of communicative language proficiency but remains a difficult construct to assess in language tests. In the oral proficiency interview (OPI), strategic competence is typically assessed through the use of role-plays with a complication. Assessment of test-taker performance on the role-play is subjective and is contingent on raters accurately identifying interactional evidence of strategic competence. Accordingly, validation of the strategic competence exhibited in role-plays has been mostly interpretive. To obtain evidential support for an interpretive argument that role-plays can indeed isolate and provide assessment evidence of strategic competence, the criterion of ontological realism is applied in this study. Towards that end, eleven samples of English-as-a-foreign-language OPI role-plays with a complication were judged by 52 untrained English native speakers. Evidence in support of the ontological validity of assessing strategic competence via role-plays is presented through analyses of the untrained raters’ judgments, augmented by quantitative analyses that identify sources of variation among the raters, including a post-study additional round of coding in which the notion of “success” in the role-plays was examined more granularly than can be done with dichotomous decisions.

In this globalization era, English plays an important role as a regional lingua franca in Asia. Recent years have seen a rapid development in pragmatic research in the field of English as an Asian lingua franca (Asian ELF). This study provides a systematic review of pragmatic research in Asian ELF, examining the focal research topics, main data-collection methods, and geographical areas of foci in previous literature. Twenty-two studies were systematically collected from multiple avenues for research synthesis. The results show that current ELF pragmatic research in the Asian context mainly has three research categories: communicative strategies, rapport management, and regional comparison. Verbal speech was the main research focus in Asian ELF pragmatics and only a few studies adopted a multimodal approach. The Asian Corpus of English and self-collected naturalistic data are two major data-collection methods in Asian ELF pragmatics. Additionally, research in Asian ELF pragmatics has an imbalanced geographical distribution with most studies focusing on speakers from East and Southeast Asia. These findings enrich our knowledge of current Asian ELF pragmatics and can inform our future research in the field, such as using multimodal approaches, deploying role-plays, and researching other Asian regions.